John Joseph Adams Books in Order

If you want his signature post-apocalyptic anthologies: Wastelands → Wastelands 2 → Wastelands: The New Apocalypse
If you want a linked dystopian arc: Ignorance Is Strength → Burn the Ashes → Or Else the Light
If you want big, pulpy space adventure: Cosmic Powers
If you want fantasy and magic in short fiction: The Way of the Wizard
If you want a magazine sampler: People of Color Destroy Science Fiction! → Lightspeed Magazine, October 2011

John Joseph Adams was born in New Jersey and grew up mostly in Florida. He found science fiction and fantasy early, reading books like A Wrinkle in Time and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but he did not think of himself as a full-on genre reader right away. He wandered off into other sections for a while, then circled back.

That return mattered. Adams has talked about moving from Robin Cook's medical thrillers to Michael Crichton, then on to Ben Bova and Robert J. Sawyer, and realizing that science fiction could be smart, tense, and very readable at the same time. He was not just looking for rockets and gadgets. He was looking for ideas that still felt like stories.

A game helped too.

He has said that Dungeons & Dragons lit the spark that pushed him toward trying to write, and that his interest in writing is what eventually led him to editing. After earning his English degree from the University of Central Florida in December 2000, he moved to New Jersey with a simple goal, get into science fiction and fantasy publishing. In 2001 he landed at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction as an editorial assistant, then worked his way up to assistant editor over nearly nine years.

That apprenticeship shaped almost everything that came after. Adams has credited editor Gordon Van Gelder with teaching him not just the mechanics of editing, but how the field works. He also started freelancing and pitching anthology ideas while still at the magazine, which gave him room to figure out what kind of editor he wanted to be.

His first major break came from not giving up on one good idea. He originally tried to sell an anthology of original post-apocalyptic fiction and could not place it. Instead of dropping the theme, he reworked it as a reprint anthology, and that became Wastelands. The book took off, and it opened the door to a long run of themed anthologies that showed how broad his taste really was.

That range is the fun of reading across Adams's work. Wastelands and its follow-ups lean into ruined futures, survival, and the strange lives people build after collapse. The Way of the Wizard gathers stories about magic users from many corners of fantasy. Cosmic Powers goes the other way and embraces big, energetic space adventure. Then there is People of Color Destroy Science Fiction!, a special issue that made room for a wider set of voices and experiences inside the genre.

He is also closely tied to the magazine side of speculative fiction. Adams left The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction to edit Lightspeed, later took over Fantasy Magazine, and helped launch Nightmare. If you read a lot of short fiction, you have probably run into his editorial taste, fast-moving stories, strong concepts, and a willingness to let science fiction, fantasy, and horror overlap instead of sitting in neat little boxes.

He has won Hugo, Stoker, Locus, and British Fantasy awards, and he has been a many-time World Fantasy Award finalist. For five years he also ran the John Joseph Adams Books imprint at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, extending his curatorial instincts from short fiction into novels.

He is still, very clearly, a short fiction person.

These days Adams has also been working as an editor and game designer on tabletop roleplaying projects for Kobold Press, Paizo, and Monte Cook Games. That move makes a lot of sense. His career has always been about building worlds, finding good voices, and figuring out what happens when people are put under pressure. He just happens to do it one story, one anthology, and sometimes one game book at a time.